The list of what a productive, healthy, happy human being must do everyday to be productive, healthy and happy, is multiplying like gremlins. Or tribbles. (Insert own cuddly-but-deadly monster here.)

We’re supposed to exercise at least thirty minutes a day, sleep eight hours a night, cook our meals from wholesome, local, organic sources (which involves finding/buying those ingredients – which is a whole other blog post I’ll get to some day), walk 10,000 steps, meditate or pray, stretch, not eat sugar of any kind, read all labels, store nothing in plastic, and check and respond to all emails, Facebooks, Linked Ins, Twitters. We need to shower, brush our teeth, have languid meals to aide digestion, and I haven’t even scratched the surface on what Dr. Oz and Martha Stewart might add to this list. But I’m sure it would involve a chartreuse smoothie and your own bee colony.

If you have small children, you do all of these things covered in other people’s poo/snot/oatmeal, with nary a moment of mental silence to complete a sentence out loud, let alone in your head. Unless that sentence is, “Please, for the love of all that is holy, move your little a#$.” I seem to complete that one a lot. In my head. Please don’t call CPS.I was at a writer’s seminar and heard the speaker say that “to be a successful writer, you must write every day.” At this moment in time, my youngest was four months old and I was getting so little sleep I had fainting spells. After the talk, I lamented with my fellow writers, knowing that even with some child care, there was no way on this not as green earth as it used to be that I could write every day.“Even emails count,” said a trying-to-be-helpful woman. “Use every chance you can to write well.”Ok, that’s doable. Maybe five out of ten emails I could take more than a nano-second to compose and send. I was feeling a bit better. Then, up strolled a late-middle-aged, tweed be-decked man.He: “Saying you can’t find time to write every day just means you don’t really want to be a writer.”Me: “Well, I take care of my four-month old, a three-year old, and I have two other jobs, so it’s not so much commitment but time in the day.” Polite laughter.He: Patronizing chuckle. “I wake up at five every morning and write for three hours. That’s the commitment I make.”Me: “Yeah, I’m up at 5am every morning too. Breastfeeding.”But Tweeded Man has a point: writing every day does help one’s craft. Exercising every day does help one’s bottom, sleeping eight hours a night does help one get off Zoloft. Your own bees do make better honey. But right now, in the midst of little-little kids, work, writing a novel, and not enough disposable income to employ both Mr. Carson and Mary Poppins, I’m in chaos mode. (Case in point, my four-year old has interrupted me six times in the last fifteen minutes. So much for her “quiet play time.”)

So sadly, I can’t spend twenty minutes crafting a two-line email. Instead, said email will have typos in it and only half the letters that should be capitalized will be. Because I’m typing one handed. With the other, I’m stirring the Seattleite-obligatory from-scratch-organic-happy-meat-home-canned-tomato ragu, I’m using my foot to play ball with my one-year old, and I’m trying to Love & Logic/Emotionally Coach my four year-old through her denied request for more goldfish.I don’t see this as failure.When I do get time to write, I throw all of myself in to it. I work. Hard. But just because it’s not every day, nor will it amount to 10,000 hours any time soon, I don’t see this as giving up. This is not lack of taking my commitments seriously. This is endurance.